Biological desiderata

A cicada is a special kind of matter in the universe because it has an autonomy that is expressed through its integrated functional organization. Like all other organisms a cicada expresses biological agency: it has structures, processes, and behavior that combine to express a unity of purpose – the universal, objective, and ultimate propensity of the whole organism to survive, reproduce, and flourish (the biological axiom). Living systems are information processors with a behavioral orientation that includes the capacity to adapt according to Darwinian principles. Human agency is a highly evolved and minded form of biological agency.

These characteristics are what most obviously distinguish every organism from inanimate objects and the dead. Without an acknowledgment of the universal and purposive goals of biological agency, life assumes the character of inanimate matter, of purposeless physics and chemistry, while biology itself becomes a collection of unrelated facts.

– the claims made on this web site are best set within an overall biological context. The discussion below frames claims that are argued in more detail in the articles what is life?, purpose, biological agency, human-talk, being like-minded, biological values,  morality, and reason, value, knowledge –

Biological desiderata – a philosophy of biology

How should we provide an overview of the biological landscape – a current assessment of what biological science has told us about the world and what remains to be done.

Perhaps we can begin with an outline of terms and conditions. A philosophy of biology should: define and analyze key biological terms and ideas; investigate the nature and methodology of biological explanations; determine what constitutes life and the differences between living and non-living; examine evolutionary theory and its philosophical interpretations; evaluate the ethical implications of biological research and practices; investigate connections between biology and other scientific fields; reflect on how biology informs our understanding of human nature.

There will always be a healthy and evolving exchange of ideas concerning the key principles and concepts that underpin any academic subject. In biology, this diversity of opinion immediately surfaces when we attempt to provide a precise definition of what we mean by ‘life’ and ‘biology’. We accept, for example, that biology is ‘ . . . the scientific study of living organisms and their interactions with the environment, that it encompasses a wide range of topics, including the structure, function, growth, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy of living things’^[1] because resistance to generality demands concentrated and compelling argument.

This website argues that science is best served when we recognize that life is an expression of biological agency as goal-directed behavior. It is this characteristic that most obviously distinguishes the living from the inanimate and dead. Human minded agency is then just one, highly evolved, form of biological agency.

Goal-directed behavior, the kind of behavior that usually attracts talk of agents and agency, is pervasive and real in nature, but useful words like ‘agent’, ‘agency’, and ‘purpose’ are frequently omitted from the biological canon for outdated philosophical reasons. If notions of agency are to be formally reintroduced to biology, then this must be done with clarity and understanding of past history.  PPP focuses specifically on the evolution of biological agency as goal-directedness, closely defined, and paradigmatically exemplified in the inherited behavior of individual organisms.

One way of critiquing the notion of agency in biology – of understanding evolved behavior – is to see how well biological entities fit into assorted agential schema. This is the approach of philosopher Samir Okasha who offers a framework for dialogue about agency in biology that recognizes two roles or motivations for the word ‘agency’: first, as a thesis of agential individuation, that ‘organisms are agents’ (OAT) and, second, as a tool to aid the understanding of evolved biological behavior, the ‘organisms as agents’ heuristic (OAH). He proposes four (non-vernacular) senses of ‘agency’ and examines their suitability for application in biology: the minimal concept (doing something or behaving), the intelligent agent (capacity to adapt: AI), the rational agent (maximized utility: economics), and the intentional agent (use of psychological states—beliefs, desires, and intentions: philosophy).

It is, of course, possible to find agency, in some sense, in a city transport system, a robot, an ant colony, a species, a gene, a heart, or an oak tree. PPP is concerned specifically with paradigmatic biological agency, its definition, actual evolution, and manifestation. Perhaps controversially it assumes a real evolutionary link between biological modes of expressing agency, most notably the link between shared (universal) goal-directedness and its human manifestation (in part) as conscious intention.

Much confusion and disservice to biology has arisen from the semantic divorce of subjective notions from their grounding in real biology and the critical biological role played in nature by ‘mindless’ but goal-directed processes – not least of which was the creation of human bodies, brains, and subjectivity.

Instead of treating human agency as just one form of biological agency, it has been conventional to treat it as unique and special. This ignores the fact that in evolutionary biology, though we can establish characteristics that uniquely define a biological feature, in real-life these features are always physically (not theoretically) associated with characteristics that are shared with other organisms due to their common ancestry. That is, uniquely minded concepts cannot be divorced from evolutionarily associated characteristics that are a necessary part of universal biological agency. Biological organisms and their features (structures, processes, behaviors) necessarily express both similarity and difference in relation to other organisms.

The conventional separation of mental characteristics from their biological origins is part of a long cultural and semantic tradition that does not reflect scientific reality. However, being more scientific brings its own difficulties and confusions when considering the relationship between, on the one hand, minded and mindless organisms and, on the other, the distinction between biological agency and human agency.

One major part of the scientific endeavor is parsimony – the attempt to explain complexity in the simplest but most efficient way possible. This website explains how the goal-directedness (agency) of organisms engages structures in the universal processes of information processing, a behavioral orientation, and adaptation that are a necessary part of the universal biological propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish.

The problem arises for most biologists because they have not established a clear notion of what is meant by ‘biological agency’.

Biological agency

Agency is about goals, actions, behavior, and processes.

Biological agency^[4] is an inherited and life-defining behavioral property of all living organisms. It is manifested in the autonomous and flexible behavior of organisms acting on, and responding to, their conditions of existence in a unified and goal-directed way. As a behavioral disposition, it is grounded in the universal, objective, and ultimate biological necessity to survive, reproduce, and flourish – a precondition for life itself. These goals are: universal because they are expressed by all organisms; objective because they are a mind-independent empirical fact; and ultimate because they are a summation, unification, and limit to all proximate goals. These universal biological goals constitute a unity of purpose towards which all autonomous organisms, both minded and mindless – including their structures, processes, and behaviors – are directed.

Goals & Purpose

The goals of organisms are the uncomplicated limits or stable end-states to natural processes that follow conventional causal pathways – the formation of an oak tree from an acorn, a chicken from an egg.^[2]

The term ‘teleology’ is sometimes used to mistakenly imply that biological goals infer one or more of the following:  the influence of God or supernatural forces, the reading of human intentions into nature, or backward causation acting like a mysterious pull from the future. None of these interpretations is necessary.

Goals take precedence in biology as a matter of explanatory priority. Only when the goals of organisms in their entirety are understood can there be a meaningful understanding of their structures, processes, and behaviors which conform to these ultimate organismal goals. That is, structures, processes, and behaviors have their own individual functions – what they are ‘for’ as contributors to the overall goal-directedness of the organism.  Organismal goals do not challenge the natural order of cause and effect; they must be first in explanation, and last in causal sequence.

Goal-directedness in organisms is an empirical fact and whether goals constitute reasons and/or purposes seems a matter of taste. It is argued on this website that the notion of ‘purpose’ is unnecessarily linked inextricably to the conditions of conscious intention.

Without understanding the reasons for (purposes of) an organism’s behavior as goals – including the role played by structures, processes, and behaviors in the attainment of these goals – biological explanation becomes an incoherent list of dissociated facts.

We intuitively distinguish between the living and the inanimate or dead. But what is it about life that we recognize as special and unique: what is it that sets living matter apart from the other matter of the universe?

Algorithm of life

Expressed in a detached, mechanical, and quasi-mathematical way, we can say that organisms are autonomous units of matter that repeatedly self-replicate while incorporating feedback from the environment, thus creating the possibility for continuity of kind over many generations. This replication with environmental feedback is referred to here as the algorithm of life.

Agency

This is a neat 21st century summary of life from an evolutionary perspective but it quickly passes over the crucial property of ‘autonomy’. Organisms both act on, and respond, to their environments, not in an indifferent way like a rock, but with flexible goal-directed behavior. It is this objective and flexible goal-directed behavior, found in all organisms, which imparts to them an independence of action as a form of agency that is referred to on this web site as biological agency.

This was a form of agency that emerged from the matter of the universe with the first independent organisms.

Purpose

The goals of agents are appropriately called purposes, as reasons for action.

Organisms are not purposeless lumps of organic matter in a purposeless universe. The purpose (reasons for the behaviour) of organisms derives from their own origin and place in the scheme of things – from the flexible but unified and goal-directed behaviour that is an expression of autonomous agency.

Goals

Biological axiom

The agential precondition for life as the capacity to survive, reproduce, and flourish is a foundational biological principle with the properties of a mathematical axiom, and is referred to here as the biological axiom.

This unity of purpose – the universal agency of living organisms – is, in effect, a biological axiom, a summary of the preconditions for all life. It is therefore also a statement of biological necessity.

The biological axiom is, simultaneously, a declaration of agency, purpose, and normativity as behavioral orientation or ‘preference’. It is not only a statement about the way organisms are and what they do, it is also a statement of crude valuation because it describes the ends or goals to which they are drawn as the motivation for their behavior. This is a behavioral orientation that is referred to here as biological normativity.

Mindless goals

The biological axiom expresses a mindless and mechanical behavioral orientation of autonomous units of matter – the universal, objective, and ultimate ‘goals’ that ground the behaviour of all living organisms.

Organisms, as autonomous agents, are not indifferent to their surroundings. They express what, in human terms, would be called a ‘perspective’ or ‘point of view’.

Mindedness

From the perspective of an evolutionary biologist mindedness is not a precondition for the existence of agency in living organisms: mindedness is simply one expression of biological agency. Human minds do not invent biological agency as metaphor: instead, it was out of biological agency that human minds and human subjectivity evolved.

Human bodies, human brains, and human subjectivity are the products of biological agency.

The diversity of structures, processes, and behaviors that constitute the community of life is an evolutionary exploration of these agential conditions

The biological axiom is an undifferentiated foundational statement of biological fact, purpose (reason, function), agency, and normativity. It explains what orgabisms do and why they do it.
It is undifferentiated because it is a statement of generality that only acquires meaning when explained in the minded language of differentiated intentional terms:

As a statement of fact – it describes the way organisms are

As a statement of purpose and agency – it explains what organisms do and why they do it – what they are for (their mission as ultimate goals) 

As statement of normativity – it tells us what organisms ‘prefer’, ‘choose’, or value – it is a declaration of biological ‘interests’ that may be enhanced or hindered. That is, in biological systems there are winners and losers, advantages and disadvantages, also structures and functions that are more or less efficient and effective

We tenaciously maintain that values are inextricably linked to conscious intention. How can organisms possibly have values? Surely it is nonsense to claim that an oak tree has interests?

The Biological Axiom

The biological axiom is the keystone of biological agency and requires further explanation.

We associate science with the establishment of secure principles and universal laws, most notably the universal laws of physics. Viewed in this way, biology is then the subset of complex (living) matter that exists within all-embracing physics. The universal law-like statements of physics are like the absolute certainties of mathematics . . .  the dictates of Gods.

Maths is built on axioms – statements that are taken as self-evident, foundational, and uncontroversial. A couple of examples from Euclid’s geometry would be that ‘Things that are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another’ and that ‘All right angles are equal to one-another’. To deny an axiom is to undermine foundations. If we argue that Euclid’s axioms are mistaken then we are, in effect, challenging the entire enterprise of Euclidian geometry.

We respect the empirical generalizations of science (its principles and laws) because they have predictive power and therefore help us manage the world and our lives. Physical constants, the laws of physics, have the properties of axioms because they resist contrary evidence and cannot be altered without transforming our understanding of theoretical foundations.

Can there be axioms in biology?

Well, if there are axioms in biology then, as a biology student, I was certainly never taught them. Since biology is restricted to the study of life, then its axioms would, presumably, set out life’s universal conditions.

Aristotle, the founder of biology, was a specialist in first principles. He wrote the world’s first systematic treatise on logic, Organon, much of which still stands today as the basis for deductive logic. He fully understood the importance of axioms as points of stability and reference: that they are a backstop to the tendency for questioning to become diffuse, or circular, or to pass into an infinite regress.

Aristotle was also aware that we can view things from different perspectives and therefore describe and explain them in different ways. His four ’causes’ outlined major ways of providing a definition or explanation of something . . . by describing what it is made of (material cause), its major or defining features (formal cause), how it was made (efficient cause), and what it is for (final cause).

Aristotle noted that to continue existing (to perpetuate their kind) living beings must reproduce. He summarized this principle by saying that all living creatures ‘partake in the eternal and divine’. By this he meant that organisms can replicate their kind (species) indefinitely (eternally) provided they can survive to reproduce. Today, using different words, we might refer, like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, to the ‘immortality of our genes’.

For Aristotle, the intellectual search for the foundation of biology, what it means to be a living being, ended appropriately with its final cause, with what it is ‘for’. And this, Aristotle considered, was ‘survival and reproduction’.

Biologists today think little of Aristotle, or axioms, or final causes, but any cursory examination of biological texts reveals that his general assumption about the foundations of biology persists, though rarely expressed as a necessary first principle. Even so, it remains a universal truism about life that cannot be expressed in simpler terms; it is the impetus or drive behind life when viewed from the perspective of unified and agential (directed) process.

We cannot expect logical certainty in biology, but the biological axiom is a simple and easily comprehended necessary and sufficient agential condition for all biological existence. It observes that though organisms, as agents, differ greatly in kind, complexity, and means of attaining their goals, they share the characteristics expressed in the biological axiom as an ultimate ‘unity of purpose’.

We attribute purpose and agency to phenomena that act – that have goals. The biological axiom is a statement about life that encompasses the greatest possible meaningful semantic generality and range. It expresses, as succinctly as possible, the universal mindless and minded necessary and sufficient agential goals that ground all living organisms – from the simplest organism at the dawn of life to the present-day complex diversity that includes modern humans with their consciousness and intentional behaviour. It is a statement of the ultimate purposes of living organisms.

Flourishing

Survival and reproduction have been grounding principles of biology since its inception, so the introduction of a further term seems unjustified, controversial, and unnecessary. Why suggest this?

What is the purpose of a living organism? Is this a silly, meaningless, and unanswerable question? Is it ultimately a matter of energy distribution, thermodynamics, and entropy? Is it about the organism’s genes producing more copies of themselves? Is it about growing, reproducing, and obtaining food? Is it about the accruing of information? We cannot explain something in terms of itself, but perhaps Aristotle was close when he said that the purpose of an organism was to achieve its maximum potential – to be itself as best it can. That is what organisms do mindlessly (that is what they show us without words) and what humans do under the watchful gaze of their evolved consciences and shared symbolic languages.

Even in biological terms, though ultimate goals may be adequately summarized as ‘survival and reproduction’, much time is spent in the pursuit of proximate goals. Biology may have duped us humans into thinking we are less constrained by our biology than we actually are, but there is a space for proximate goals, for what is referred to here as ‘flourishing’.

Adaptation

The short-term adaptive behavior of organisms establishes the evolutionary context for natural selection and genotypic change as what, over the long term, is incorporated into the genome – the traits that enhance the perpetuation of its kind.

Life, biology, & biological explanation

Only when the goals of autonomous organisms are understood can we provide adequate biological explanations of their structures, processes, and behaviors.

There is no mystery about biological goals or ends. We understand them as the terminations or limits of natural processes: an acorn becoming an oak tree, or a girl becoming a woman. This potential within nature (allowing for occasional mishap) to actualize in a predictable way does not challenge the natural order of cause and effect. Goals are first in explanation, and last in causal sequence; they do not imply supernatural forces and, more important, they are not the reading of human intention into intentionless nature. Biological goals are real.

Aristotle’s teleology explains what is unique about life and biological explanations. This natural teleology has been expressed in a more formal philosophical way as: ‘. . . the realization of pre-existing internal potential (as formal-efficient and material-efficient causation) through stages framed by conditional necessity’. In other words, there is nothing unscientific, spooky, or logically problematic about agency and purpose in nature.

The challenge for biology and the philosophy of biology is less about overcoming our inclination to insert human properties into nature, and more about providing a scientific account of the role played by nature in our humanity. That is what this website tries to do.

The biological imperative

The biological axiom is not spoken or thought by organisms; it is demonstrated in their behaviour. In an inversion of reasoning we mistakenly assume that because only humans can represent biological values in their minds, then these values can only exist in human minds – that humans create biological values.

It is better to live than not live. This is a fundamental value not spoken or thought by non-human organisms, but demonstrated in their behaviour. Only humans are aware of this value, but humans did not create it.

Just as it is possible to isolate those factors that we can reliably regard as universal biological goals, it is also possible to establish those key limiting and universal conditions that are necessary if these goals are to be attained. These are determined more by logical necessity than experiment and observation.

Goal-directed activity necessarily entails the gathering, storage, and exchange of information. Thus information processing is an essential feature of coordinated activity as autonomous organisms interact with their conditions of existence (both internal and external).

This information must be organized in an orderly way if goals are to be attempted or attained and this goal-directedness is most apparent in the specific behavioral orientation of all organisms to survive, reproduce, and flourish.

Since the conditions of existence for all organisms are always in a state of flux, their behavior must be flexible – they must have the capacity to adapt.

These are the universal ingredients of biological agency as a process – the processing of information through a behavioral orientation that has the capacity to adapt.

From these mindless foundational ingredients many agential things follow that have long been confused with mental phenomena. To respond and adapt even mindless organisms must have the capacity to discriminate objects and processes of their inner and outer environments, adapting to circumstances with a goal-directed unity of purpose. The behavioral flexibility grounded in the objectives of the biological axiom, expresses the biological agency that is at the heart of biological science and its explanations of the natural world. It is out of this mindless behavioral flexibility and agential autonomy that our human subjectivity as a minded conscious capacity to discriminate between ‘self’ and ‘other’ evolved.

Parts of organisms do not have goals in the same way that autonomous organisms have goals. It is helpful to distinguish between the unity of purpose of an entire organism, to which its structures, processes, and behaviors contribute, and the functions of its parts. While functions can be independently interpreted and assessed, they are, nevertheless, subordinate to ultimate biological goals.

is is

This , and all that this implies, beginning with a recognition of real biological agency.  This is most obvious in the refusal to recognize that there is real biological agency in the goal-directed behavior of all living organisms and that human minded agency is not separate from, but a highly evolved form of, this grounding biological agency. Whether organisms are agents, or merely agent-like, is not a matter of semantics: it turns on whether the goal-directedness of autonomous organisms is a part of the fabric of nature, or just a form of human mental representation.

The goal-directedness of organisms is an objective fact with the operation of their structures, processes, and behaviors, subordinate to the ultimate goals of the whole organism as an autonomous biological agent. The goals of non-sentient organisms are clearly not conscious or minded goals – they are a behavioral propensity and human minded goals are just one evolutionary expression of these goals. That is, human agency evolved out of biological agency, it did not invent biological agency. The inappropriate use of anthropomorphic language (a vine ‘trying’ to reach the light) does not negate the goal-directedness of the vine, only its mindedness.

Organisms are not passive and indifferent to their conditions of existence; they have a ‘perspective’. A biological agent displays the universal, objective and ultimate goals of survival, reproduction, and flourishing. This is a directed behavioral propensity that may be helped or hindered by circumstance, to which the biological agent responds with flexible behavior akin to ‘choice’. This is what gives life the perspective that in evolved mindedness is referred to as ‘value’.

Traditionally ‘minded’ concepts are more scientifically coherent when considered as part of the real fabric of all life, not creations of the human mind. Included here are agency, purpose, value, knowledge, and reason which, consistent with evolution, exist in nature in graded form.

The brief points below (discussed in greater detail in other articles) constitute a defense of agential realism, bioteleological realism, and biological normativity (as a form of moral naturalism). They summarize the key characteristics of life; how mindless purpose, agency, and normativity are possible; how to discriminate between the minded and mindless (in relation to biological agency and human agency) in both language and the world; the relationship between biological normativity and human ethics; and why it is scientifically more appropriate to treat organisms as real agents rather than being agent-like.

Anthropomorphism

Usually, when we use anthropomorphic language in relation to mindless organisms (see human-talk), especially that of cognitive metaphor, we are drawing attention to a likeness of biological agency (likeness due to common ancestry) that we share with other organisms, we are not suggesting that these organisms have cognitive faculties like ours. So, when we say that a plant wants water we are not trying to convey a literal scientific belief that plants have cognitive faculties (which must be interpreted as metaphor), instead, we are indicating that without water the plant will be unable to survive, reproduce, and flourish: we are drawing attention to a likeness (as simile) that we share with plants due to our shared biological agency.

Biology

Biology is the study of life. The basic physical unit of life is the organism, whose basic unit of composition is the cell. The basic unit of biological classification is the species.

Life

Life is studied from many perspectives (physiological, thermodynamic, biochemical, genetic etc.) and on many scales (from molecules to populations and ecosystems etc.). From a human perspective, it is most easily comprehended in terms of autonomous organisms whose structures, processes, and behaviors are unified in the agential propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish. It is this biological agency that most obviously distinguishes the living from the inanimate and dead.

Biological explanation

Biological explanations are grounded in two key ideas: the agential goal-directedness of autonomous organisms (the biological agency of Aristotelian teleology), and the temporal unity of the community of life due to its origin by natural selection from a common ancestor (Darwinian evolution).

Algorithm of life

Organisms are autonomous units of matter that self-replicate while incorporating feedback from their conditions of existence, thus enabling the possibility for individual change (self-correction, adaptation), but with a continuity of kind.

Organism

Is there empirical evidence for a preferred ranking of biological objects, or is this a subjective matter that depends on our individual interests and concerns? The interdependencies in biology are so strong that several candidates emerge as potential biological building blocks, the most notable being the cell, the gene, and the organism.

All organisms are composed of cells that have autonomy because they can perform the processes necessary for life, such as metabolism, reproduction, homeostasis, and the transmission of genetic information. Indeed, multicellularity probably evolved out of unicells by means of natural selection. Are cells the basic building blocks of life?

Genes play a crucial role in heredity and the functioning of cells, but they are not capable of independent existence.

It is the agential autonomy of organisms that stands out, even though they themselves have wider dependencies within more inclusive frames – populations of their own species within a wider environmental context.

It is the concentration of agency within readily identifiable physical units that is special and unique – their narrow agential ultimate focus on survival, reproduction, and flourishing. It is towards these goals that the structures, processes, and behavior of organisms are directed and therefore subordinated. This is what genes, cells, metabolism, growth, reproduction, and adaptation are ultimately for, and this is what singles out the organism as both an intuitive and natural autonomous category within the scheme of life.

The organism is the basic operational unit of biology, and therefore evolution, because it is the biological unit that displays most strongly the life-defining agential characteristics of the biological axiom – the universal, objective, and ultimate behavioral propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish. Short-term behavioral goals drive organisms to adapt and compete in the immediate present while, over the long-term (many generations) this behavior results in the natural selection of genetic traits that are passed on to future generations.

The biological axiom

Living organisms are biological agents that express their autonomy as a unity of agency and purpose – the universal, objective, and ultimate behavioral propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish when confronting their conditions of existence

The biological axiom observes that life is predicated on the survival, reproduction, and flourishing of organisms as autonomous agents.

This is a principle of life and its individuation. It states the necessary but conditional preconditions for life and how it is expressed through the integrated units of functional organization that we call organisms. As a statement of the objective goals of organisms it is a simple scientific statement of biological purpose.

Significantly, the goals of the biological axiom are mindless goals that are not the result of conscious deliberation; they are a precondition for life itself. Minds exist in bodies that are subordinate to bodily limitations and constraints.

The universal, objective, and ultimate goal-directed preconditions of the biological axiom are referred to here as biological agency. These goals are: universal because they are expressed by life as a whole; objective because they are a mind-independent empirical fact; and ultimate because they are a summation and unification of all proximate goals, including those of minded organisms. For the individual organism, these conditions are temporary because death is a precondition for individual lives, but its kind (the species) has the conditional potential to persist indefinitely.

The biological axiom is an existential grounding statement for all forms of biological agency including human minded agency – as well as purpose, intention, knowledge, reason, and value.

Biological goals

The goals of organisms are the uncomplicated limits or ends to natural processes that follow conventional causal pathways. They are not a convenient heuristic device, and they do not require or imply the presence of supernatural forces, the reading of human intentions into nature, or backward causation acting like a mysterious pull from the future. Only when the goals of whole organisms are known can their necessitating conditions be understood. Thus, biological ends have explanatory priority (hence the ‘final cause’ associated with teleology) but they do not challenge the natural order of cause and effect: they are first in explanation, last in causation.

Goals are simply a behavioral orientation directed towards some outcomes rather than others. In human terms this is an expression of value that underpins, but does not determine, moral decisions.

Biological agency

Biological agency is an inherited life-defining property of living organisms that is expressed in autonomous behavior – the capacity of whole living organisms to act on, and respond to, their conditions of existence in a unified way. They do so in flexible ways that can potentially facilitate or impede (help or hinder) their existence. This flexible goal-directed behavior is grounded in the universal, ultimate, and objective goals of survival, reproduction, and flourishing (the biological axiom). These goals constitute a unity of purpose towards which all organisms – including their structures, processes, and behaviors – are directed.

Thus, living organisms are not passive, like rocks: they demonstrate behavioral autonomy that facilitates factors that promote these universal goals, and resist factors that impede them. Organisms therefore demonstrate behavior that resembles a human ‘perspective’, ‘attitude’, or ‘point of view’ in relation to their conditions of existence: they display objective behavior that mindlessly promotes their continued existence. This mindless behavioral orientation is a fact or mode of existence that in human terms would be interpreted as a value – ‘it is better to live than not live‘. This is a form of ‘biological normativity’ and it is reasonable to assume that it is out of this behavioral propensity that human values evolved, and in which human values are grounded.

It is the tension between the propensity to autonomy and the constraints of circumstance that establish the distinction between living agent and environment (expressed in human form as the distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’).

The central importance of action in the expression of agency places emphasis on behavior directed towards goals or ends that are the starting point for biological explanation, these ultimate goals relating more to whole organisms as beneficiaries although supported by in the pursuit of these goals by the functioning of their parts, processes and behaviors.  Even mindless living organisms have the capacity to discriminate between the objects and processes of their inner and outer environments,^[50] adapting to circumstances with a goal-directed unity of purpose. The behavioral flexibility grounded in the objectives of the biological axiom, expresses the biological agency that is at the heart of biological science and its explanations of the natural world. It is out of this mindless behavioral flexibility and agential autonomy that our human subjectivity as a minded conscious capacity to discriminate between ‘self’ and ‘other’ evolved.

Parts of organisms do not have goals in the same way that autonomous organisms have goals. It is helpful to distinguish between the unity of purpose of an entire organism, to which its structures, processes, and behaviors contribute, and the functions of its parts. While functions can be independently interpreted and assessed, they are, nevertheless, subordinate to ultimate biological goals.

As open and dynamic agential systems, organisms regulate and integrate their flows of energy, materials, and information. In the short-term (one generation) this behaviour occurs over a lifecycle of fertilization, growth and development, maturation, reproduction, senescence, and death. Over the long term (multiple generations) organisms, as products of natural selection, display species-specific adaptive design and the potential to evolve new forms when heritable variation, transmitted to phenotypes via the chemical DNA, is subjected to environmental selection.

The emergent properties of biological agency arose in nature in a naturalistic and causally transparent way (inherited variation with feedback) that did not imply either backward causation or the intentions of either humans or gods. These agential, purposive, and normative properties of organisms preceded people in evolutionary time: they existed in nature mindlessly. That is, the notions of ‘purpose’, ‘value’, and ‘agency’ as described here, can refer to both minded and mind-independent conditions.

Agency has two key components: abstract goals that are expressed as a behavioral disposition, and the physical structures and processes that manifest these goals.

Agency & purpose

Goal-directed behavior is purposeful behavior – it is behavior for reasons or ends. The presence of goals need not imply the influence of God, the insinuation of human intent, or backward causation. Goal-directedness in nature is real, and without understanding the reasons for (purposes of) an organism’s behavior as goals – including the role played by structures, processes, and behaviors in the attainment of these goals – biological explanation becomes an incoherent listing of dissociated facts.

Emphasis on ends may be interpreted as implying an unnatural backward causation or pull from the future. This is a quirk of explanation. Only when the ultimate goals expressed by the functional organization of a whole organism are appreciated can the roles of its necessitating parts and functions be fully understood. In this way biological ends have explanatory priority (hence the ‘final cause’ associated with teleology) but they do not challenge the natural order of cause and effect.

In a comparable way, the internal processing that initiates the behavior of organisms only becomes meaningful in terms of the behavior it generates. Behavior is explanatorily prior to the inner processing that initiates it (whether mental or other).

We ask about purposes and functions in biology precisely because organisms are agents. We do not ask what the moon or rocks are ‘for’, because they do not behave in a purposeful agential way.

Mindless biological purposes preceded, and gave rise to, the minded purposes we associate with human agency. That is, minded human agency evolved out of mindless biological agency. People did not create purpose and agency, it was the mindless purpose and agency in nature that gave rise to people – their bodies, brains, and minds.

The agential (goal-directed) orientation of biological behavior gives organisms a ‘perspective’ (albeit often a mindless one) on their existence such that their goals may be (mindlessly) helped or hindered.

Biological agency & human agency

Human minded agency evolved out of the mindless biological agency whose ultimate goals (behavioral propensities) were established billions of years before.

Biological agency and human agency are not mutually exclusive characteristics in the same way that we might regard organisms with minds as distinct from those without minds. That is, while human agency has uniquely minded characteristics it also shares the universal grounding characteristics of biological agency.

This may be compared to the way we accept that sexuality exists (almost) universally across the community of life, even though it is expressed in a wide range of behaviors and physical forms. Human sexuality is expressed in a uniquely human way, but this does not mean that only human sexuality is ‘real’, and that the sexuality of other organisms is only sexual-like.

Adaptation

The word ‘adaptation’ is used as both a verb denoting process (an organism adapting to its environment) and a noun (the eye is a complex adaptation). It is the latter that is generally applied in formal definitions such as ‘an evolved phenotypic trait that enhances fitness’.

The process of adaptation has both short- and long-term components that are both determined by the ultimate goals of the biological axiom.

Short-term adaptation is behavioral adaptation; it is the compromise reached between the ultimate demands of the biological axiom and its conditions of existence. This is a real-time fine-tuning of behavior as an expression of organismal autonomy and is presumably what Darwin meant when he talked about the ‘struggle for life’. This struggle, over the long term, results inherited novelties as genetic adaptation resulting in evolutionary change. Over many generations, changes in structures, processes, or behaviors that enhance an organism’s differential survival and reproduction based on their heritable traits (fitness maximization) are referred to as adaptations. It is a form of phenotypic control that occurs throughout the biological system but is expressed most obviously in the integrated goals of autonomous organisms. Behavioral adaptation, over the longer term, determines the heritable traits of structures, processes, or behaviors that affect an organism’s survival and reproduction, and it is these heritable traits, that are called adaptations and are treated as being at the core of fitness maximization. In short, organisms are the canonical units enacting evolutionary change, even when change is expressed in non-organismal terms, such as the properties of genes.

Conditions of existence can facilitate or impede the attainment of behavioral goals, a consequence of the universal organismal behavioral orientation (biological axiom). As a biological agent, then, goals may be  ‘helped’ or ‘hindered’ giving organisms a behavioral ‘perspective’ on life as a ‘mindless value’.  If desired, the implication of agency is avoided by either describing agential traits as dispositional properties or as etiological outcomes (an inevitable developmental or evolutionary outcome).

While not all traits are necessarily adaptive, or an outcome of natural selection (there may be other evolutionary processes involved) Darwin’s key concept of natural selection acting on heritable variation within a population remains the cornerstone of empirically based evolutionary theory.

Biological agency is a grounding notion for both single- and multiple-generation change. The language of adaptation, natural selection, selective pressure, fitness maximization, and evolution in general, are littered with words like ‘better’ and ‘worse’, ‘help’ and ‘hinder’, facilitate’ or ‘impede’, ‘benefits’ and ‘disadvantages’, ‘strategies’, and so on. The inappropriate use of anthropomorphism is an attempt to express the real but mindless biological agency that is still not fully acknowledged in biological science. While adaptation, like the behavior of most organisms, is neither deliberate nor conscious it is, nevertheless, the product of agential (goal-directed) behavior: that is, the notion of adaptation brings with it, of necessity, the notion of agency. The notion of fitness associated with adaptation is blatantly and inherently agential in character. Without the presumption of agency, the concepts of adaptation and natural selection are, to all intents and purposes, incoherent.

Aristotle gave Darwin the agential key that was needed to unlock the theory of evolution.

Proximate & ultimate goals

The multitude of operations/functions of structures, processes, and behaviors of organisms are all subordinate (proximate to) the ultimate and mindless goals of the biological axiom.

Human minded goals are, in this sense, only proximate goals that serve the whole-body ultimate and mindless goals of biological agency that had evolved billions of years before.

So, for example, we humans eat for minded proximate ends (taste and smell stimulation and the satiation of hunger), that have the mindless ultimate biological end of survival. We have sex for minded proximate ends (orgasm, physical and emotional gratification), but also for the mindless ultimate biological end of reproduction. We develop moral and political systems seeking the minded proximate ends of happiness, wellbeing, and pleasure, while serving the ultimate and mindless biological end of flourishing.

Physical & conceptual gradation

Before Darwin each species was regarded as a unique creation of God. Human bodies were the repositories of everlasting souls with the mind a special domain of religious and philosophical investigation. After Darwin (mid-19^th century) the entire community of life was viewed as a graded continuum of organic kinds with the human brain and mind bodily elements open to scientific investigation. Harking back to this transition, it remains unclear whether some concepts relate strictly and exclusively to human minds and human agency or whether they share more generalized features with biological agency and the continuum of life.

Consider the sentence –

‘The design we see in nature is only apparent design’.

We say that design in nature is ‘apparent’ (not real) because it is not human design, it is not created by human minds. But nature and organisms are replete with real designed structures in patterns more complex, beautiful, and ordered than anything created by humans. Mindless nature ‘created’ the miraculous and intricately integrated human body, including the brain that provides us with conscious representations of nature’s real design.

The problem is that, for many people, ‘design’ (and other words like ‘purpose’, ‘reason’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘value’) are strictly minded words appropriate only in the context of the human mind. Thus, the word ‘design’ is only used nervously in relation to organisms because it seems to imply that either mindless organisms have minds, or they were created by God. We overcome this semantic confusion with verbal obfuscation. We say that nature is ‘design-like’ or ‘designoid’.

But the implication that without minds design is not possible is clearly, and obviously, mistaken.

Our anthropocentrism simply refuses to countenance the possibility of mindless design. We forget that in biology it is the mindless goals of the biological axiom that take precedence over their later evolutionary development, the intentions of the human mind, and that they can exist in nature in a graded way. Following philosopher Dan Dennett’s mode of expression, we forget that . . .  ‘purpose’, ‘reason’, ‘agency’, ‘knowledge’, ‘value’, ‘design’ and many other concepts often attributed strictly to human minds (like consciousness) emerged out of the evolutionary process by degree: they ‘bubbled up from the bottom, not trickled down from the top‘.

Biological agency is not a fiction of the human mind, it ‘created’ human agency. Many of the concepts related strictly to human agency are best considered scientifically as sharing properties with biological agency and, in this sense, of existing in nature by degree.

Biological normativity

The biological axiom is simultaneously a statement of biological agency, biological purpose, and biological normativity. The normativity exists as a mindless perspective on existence expressed as a behavioral orientation that can be helped or hindered by circumstance. This is ‘normative’ behavior because as biological agents, organisms are not passive, they express ‘preferences’, and ‘choices’, albeit mindless ones.

As a statement of biological normativity the biological axiom expresses the objective, universal, and ultimate  behavioural 

orientation of all living organisms towards survival, reproduction, and flourishing over multiple generations. This behavioural orientation resembles a set of generalized and mindless rules for living, like a human code of conduct, and since these goals were the evolutionary precursors to human behavioral codes, they are appropriately referred to as biological normativity. But, as a mindless form of normativity, these biological values are not recommendations for behavior, or judgements about behavior, they are objective statements about the way organisms are.

Biological values are manifest differently in each biological agent. The physical structures, processes, and behaviors adopted by a spider to obtain its life energy, produce offspring, and flourish are very different from those of a sea urchin, eucalyptus tree, or the minded and proximate values of humans.

The mindless behaviour of the biological axiom is like (because evolutionarily related to) a human perspective or point of view. But the likeness is not the ‘as if’ similarity of metaphor but the reality of an evolutionary connection that warrants scientific recognition, since it is out of mindless biological values that human minded values evolved. This was the evolutionary precursor to human proximate minded goals that arise as both organismal biological desires and the culturally reasoned beliefs and codes that result from a critical examination of behavioural consequences. It is also why ultimate and objective biological goals can be expressed in human proximate subjective terms as the behavioural flexibility that allows organisms to exercise choices in relation to their interests.

Biological normativity and human normativity are not mutually exclusive. In behavioural terms, biological normativity is the lived expression of both unconscious (mindless) and conscious (minded) goals, where these occur. In humans they have taken on a highly evolved and minded form that includes reason.

Ethics (moral naturalism)

We often assume that judgements about what can ‘help’ or ‘hinder’ our lives, what makes a situation ‘better’ or ‘worse’, what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, are part of a human domain of subjective normative assessment that has little, if anything, to do with nature. How could it be otherwise? After all, nature itself does not think, it just is. Nature does not make moral decisions, or recommend codes of behaviour – that is nonsense. Moralities are obviously creations of human subjective deliberation, the application of what we call ‘reason’ as found only in human minds.

But . . .

We have inherited from nature a legacy of biological normativity as a behavioural orientation (a mindless ‘code of conduct’) – the behavioural goals of the biological axiom. When human minds evolved, along with their uniquely conscious and reasoning subjectivity, this universal, objective, and ultimate biological behavioural orientation was manifested in proximate minded form – in part as organismal needs, desires and intuitions, but also in part as cultural moral, and other, codes of behaviour – still grounded in ultimate biological normativity, but fine-tuned by reason. Moralities are human creations, but they are grounded in natural facts.

Aristotle’s normative imperative

Biological agency expresses the ‘values’ (the quotes indicate an objective behavioural orientation) of survival, reproduction, and flourishing as a necessary condition for life. This is what it means to be a living organism – it is a biological necessity.

Aristotle maintained that the ultimate goals of biological agency drive us to the conclusion that – ‘It is better to exist than not exist‘, and ‘it is better to live than not live’ – referred to here as Aristotle’s biological normative imperative. Humans describe such statements as subjective value judgements that have no logical necessity. But as statements expressing the objective nature of all organisms, including humans, (but not in inanimate objects) they do express biological necessity.

Why do organisms have the propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish? . . . ‘Because natural selection made them so‘ (Armand Leroi^[40]). Critically, and in apparent contradiction, this is not what organisms need to do, or ought to do (human subjective minded values); it is the way that they are (objective biological ‘values’). It is out of these mindless values that evolution forged minded values.

Aristotle’s normative imperative – the propensity of life, both individuals and kinds, to resist death – is an objective fact: it is not the projection of human subjective values onto life. Humans may make the minded and contestable value judgement, that ‘it is good to live’, but mindless organisms do not make value judgments, their biological ‘normativity’ is expressed in the way that they are. But humans, since they express both mindless biological agency (objective behavioural orientation) and minded human agency (subjective value) thus express both fact and value simultaneously (cf. the philosophical distinction between fact and value).

Fact & value

Our anthropocentric emphasis on the uniquely human trait of mindedness has contributed to an artificial intellectual gulf between humans and other organisms that has diminished the significance of our real biological connection. This can be attributed, in part, to the anthropocentric elevation of mindedness into a realm of values as a special mental and linguistic domain that stands in stark contrast to an unconnected realm of discourse that we call facts.

This putative difference between facts and values is widely respected within the scientific and philosophical communities. It not only sets humans apart from nature, it also separates ethics from science, and science from the humanities. But it has always been a topic of philosophical contention.

The distinction between facts and values can be addressed from the perspective of evolutionary biology.

Let us assume, reasonably, that human minded agency and its subjective values evolved out of the objective goals of the biological axiom. One simple answer to a question about the way this occurred is to say that human values arrived with human brains, thus reinforcing the fact-value distinction.

A more thorough answer would point out that both our values and ethical decisions are derived in a complex way that has both minded and mindless ingredients. Both biological and human values are established primarily through behaviour with human mindless (unconscious) behaviour including physiological responses (sweating, digesting) as well as impulses, instincts, intuitions, and other unconscious drivers emanating from the evolutionarily earlier structures of the brain. These sources are, in effect, the objective remnants of our biological agency still exerting an objective (unconscious) influence on our values, including our ethical decisions. However, human conscious values communicated by language include both unconscious and conscious elements that are moderated by our reasoning which occurs in the most recently evolved part of our brain, the frontal cortex.

We respect reason, in part, because it can substantially, but not wholly, override the influences of our mindless and unconscious biological agency.

But when we understand our subjective values from this perspective we see that they are a mixture of our inherited ancient and objective biological values (the mindless and unconscious influences on our behaviour) and the application of reason to our knowledge of these and other factors. What we call our subjective values as established by reason, include an admixture of varying quantities of objective biological value depending on circumstance. Our biology has inseparably entangled both fact and value.

Such a proposal triggers a cognitive dissonance because we both confuse (fail to distinguish between) and conflate (treat as being identical) the universal, objective, and ultimate facts of biological agency, and the uniquely human values of human agency. We fail to realize that it is possible for values to simultaneously express both similarity and difference: the shared features of biological normativity and the unique features of human agency including the use of reason with other advanced cognitive faculties.

We all (but especially intellectuals and ethicists) like to think of morality as demonstrating the supremacy of reason (morality established by pure reason), but our inclination (necessarily locked into our reason) in both politics and ethics, is to fall back on the proximate human values of maximizing happiness, wellbeing, and pleasure as influenced by the ultimate biological value of flourishing.

Biological normativity is not prescriptive in the way that moral language is prescriptive. But the faculty of reason that we proudly and rightly regard as a uniquely distinguishing feature of human agency is still grounded in biological agency and biological normativity. Though reason attempts to transcend, overcome, or be detached from biological normativity, it can only ever be partially successful. Reason itself is, of evolutionary necessity, still ultimately grounded in the biological values that give it purchase. The moral decisions that we think overcome biological normativity simply fall back on second order biological normativity.

We can and do override our biological impulses with our ethical systems (Thou shalt not kill) but the reasons I observe this moral injunction still derived from my biological normativity.  Without its foundation in biological normativity, the use of reason in moral decision-making is an incoherent and empty concept.

Since reason can never fully extricate itself from biological normativity, we must face the fact that moral discourse reduces to biological facts, that human proximate and subjective valuing evolved out of ultimate and objective biological facts. The differentiation of facts and values, the descriptive and prescriptive is, at least, exaggerated. Organisms have biological values in human-like way because that is the way they (objectively) are, and that is what led to our own subjective values.

The acceptance of the reality of biological values provides us with a more compelling scientific account of nature since the assimilation of human values to biological values acknowledges the uniquely mindful properties of human values while at the same time recognizing that they evolved out of, and share major characteristics with, their mindless evolutionary antecedents.

Technical language

We humans describe our own form of agency using the minded vocabulary of intentional psychology (needs, wants, desires, beliefs, preferences etc.) This is, in effect, a set of technical terms for the uniquely minded agency manifested by Homo sapiens.

Since the species Homo sapiens has its own agential vocabulary, a thoroughly objective science would develop parallel vocabularies for the unique modes of agency expressed by every other individual species – an impossible task. This is one major reason why we fall back on the use of human-talk as cognitive metaphor – simply because it is the agential language that is most familiar to us.

It is tempting to create a vocabulary of technical terms expressing, on the one hand, biological agency and, on the other, human agency, but this would be speciesism in the extreme.

But there is a further difficulty because, as already pointed out, biological agency and human agency are not mutually exclusive concepts. The proximate and uniquely minded goals of human agency evolved out of, and share characteristics with, the universal, objective, and ultimate mindless goals of biological agency.

Mindedness is not a precondition for agency in living organisms: mindedness is simply one expression of biological agency. We conflate the simple distinction between the minded and the mindless with the complex distinction between biological agency and human agency. It is not that biological agency is a subjective creation of the human mind (cognitive metaphor or heuristic), rather that the proximate and uniquely minded goals of human agency evolved out of, and share characteristics with, the universal, objective, and ultimate mindless goals of biological agency. More simply, the objective behavioural orientation of mindless organisms (mindless purpose) created minds: minds did not create purpose.

There is only one possible scientific solution – an acknowledgement that if current linguistic usage is to reflect nature, then minded concepts like ‘agent’,  ‘knowledge’, ‘reason’, ‘preference’, and ‘value’, which are currently restricted to discourse about humans, are extended into the realm of mindless agency. This also means that what is currently regarded as metaphor is more aptly treated in literary terms (assuming literary analagies are appropriate here) as simile (see ‘metaphor fallacy’ below).

Anthropomorphism (human-talk)

We frequently apply to non-human organisms the language that is usually preserved for humans. This is known as anthropomorphism but is referred to here, more simply, as human-talk.

We use human-talk for many reasons including: literary flourish; brevity; our human cognitive bias; and as an educational heuristic – because they make biological explanations simpler and easier to understand.

One special form of human-talk occurs when we use the language of human intentional psychology to describe non-human organisms. This is generally referred to as cognitive metaphor.

Cognitive metaphor

Cognitive metaphor is a clumsy way of acknowledging the mindless, but real, goal-directed behavior (biological agency) that is a defining characteristic of all living organisms. This use of minded language in relation to mindless organisms is one particular kind of anthropomorphism. Scientifically, this is unacceptable because it gifts organisms with cognitive qualities that, in reality, they do not, and cannot, possess.

We humans have emphasized our uniquely human kind of agency by developing a uniquely minded vocabulary (we speak of needs, wants, desires, beliefs, preferences etc.) that expresses conscious intentions, sometimes called the language of intentional psychology. A thoroughly objective science would develop parallel vocabularies to describe the unique agencies of every species – an impossible task.

However, in many cases of so-called cognitive metaphor, the language is clearly intended to convey the biological likeness associated with the grounding characteristics of biological agency, not inferring that the organism has cognitive faculties. In other words, anthropomorphic language interpreted, not literally, but in terms of its intended meaning, describes a relationship between humans and non-humans that is a real likeness based on descent with modification (biological simile grounded in evolution) not cognitive metaphor grounded in a literary device. It expresses a meeting of shared biological agency, not a meeting of minds.

We say that a plant needs water, not because we think that plants experience cognitive states (human agency), but because we intuitively appreciate the significance of survival for all life (biological agency). It is not as if a plant wants water, rather, in terms of the biological agency that plants share with humans they depend on water for their survival. The agency being communicated here is not as if or even like, but the same as our human biological dependency on water. In this sense a plant needs water for exactly the same reasons that humans need water.

We say the purpose of eyes is to see, not because eyes were an intentional creation of God, or that their purpose is a projection of our own intentions, but because, from the perspective of biological agency (the objective behavioural orientation of all organisms) we understand the agential significance of sight for all organisms that have eyes. It is not as if the purpose of eyes is to see but, conversely, given the nature of biological agency, eyes have obvious and objective agential significance.

We say a spider knows how to build its web, not because we believe that spiders are consciously aware of the principles of web construction, but because we are amazed at how, without our cognitive powers, spiders instinctively build something as intricate and purposeful as a web, using information that is passed mechanically, and with meticulous precision, from one generation to the next in their genes. Even though the capacity for web building is an adaptive trait encoded in genes, rather than a cognitive attribute, it is a manifestation of biological agency that is so sophisticated that we rightly associate it with our own agency. It is not as if a spider knows how to build a web, rather, that web building (biological agency) is extraordinarily like (and biologically related to) our human cognitive capacity to learn, remember, and apply accumulated knowledge (human agency).

Minds, bodies, & behavior

The internal processes of organisms are of biological significance only in so far as they influence behaviour: it is behaviour that confronts the testing arena of the environment.

From a human perspective this is not immediately obvious because our human conscious intentions are vivid and, even though these intentions are private, we see obvious causal connections between our intentions and outcomes in the world. There is, however, an existential directness about behaviour. We are not committed to jail for what we think, but for what we do (how we behave): it is actions and deeds (agency, behaviour) that speak louder than words. Words and ideas can indeed change the world, but only through the medium of behaviour.

A subtle shift in semantic focus takes place when talk moves from mental states to bodily behaviour, from brains with intentions to bodies with goals. First, it draws attention to the fact that human agency as expressed by human bodies engages not only our conscious intentions, but also factors determined by bodily and unconscious needs. Second, the emphasis on behaviour draws attention away from uniquely minded human agency and towards the universal goal-directed activity of all organisms as a life-defining characteristic, and an objective fact.

If we want to understand the biological significance of human agency then we must look to human behaviour and in so doing we must also look to those aspects of human behaviour that, as a consequence of evolution, are held in common with other organisms – the mutual connections that exist between human agency and biological agency.

The denial of biological agency, purpose, and values

Scour biological textbooks, or the web, and you will find little, if anything, about biological agency, biological values, or the purpose that pervades everything in nature.

This downplaying of biological agency probably dates from a time before evolutionary theory, when each species was considered a unique and special creation of God with humans being special ‘ensouled’ beings distinct from all the other creatures that had been placed on earth for human benefit.

The denial of real biological agency, purpose, and value rests on several interrelated confusions concerning the distinction between, on the one hand, organisms with minds and those without minds and, on the other, biological agency and human agency.

First, an inversion of reasoning.

In biology it is the agential behaviour of autonomous bodies that most directly determines outcomes, regardless of the internal processes that influence this behaviour. So, for example, human agency is most potently expressed by actions, not thoughts and words. Words and ideas can indeed change the world, but only through the medium of behaviour.

Because the purposes and values inherent in biological agency can only be understood by (represented in) human minds, it is often assumed that they can only exist in human minds – that they are therefore a creation of human minds. From this error of reasoning, it follows that only humans can be agents with goals, purposes, and values: that non-human organisms are, at best, only agent-like. Whereas, in fact, rather than biological goals being an invention of human minds, they are the biological substrate out of which the goals of human agency evolved.

Certainly, only minded humans can understand why animals have eyes, fish have fins, and cacti have spines; but this does not mean that these reasons and purposes do not exist outside human minds. Of course, the purpose of a prosthetic leg is established by the intentions of its inventor, but legs that occur in nature likewise have purposes, even though they were created by a natural process with no conscious intentions. We mistakenly conflate a lack of conscious intention with a lack of agency. Simply because non-human organisms lack self-awareness, does not mean that they also lack agency – that agency is mind-dependent.

Biological goals can only be understood (represented by) human minds, but that does not mean that they only exist in human minds – that they are a creation of human minds. The goals of non-human organisms are not spoken or thought; they are demonstrated in their behaviour, and they existed (were real) in nature long before they made possible the evolution of human brains, minds, and language.

Second, converse reasoning.

The pre-Darwinian mental representation of the world as a Great Chain of being (Ladder of Life) placed humans in an exalted position just below God.

Darwin replaced the image of the ladder with that of a tree whose branches were constrained by what had gone before. Humans were just one of the many evolutionary outcomes of the interaction between autonomous organisms and their ancestral environments.

Agency in nature has, likewise, taken on as many different forms as there are species, each species expressing its agency in its own way as constrained by its physical form. We marvel at the internal processing agency of the human intellect while ignoring, say, the mental miracle of a bat catching a fly using echolocation inside a cave teeming with other bats.

At present our inherited pre-Darwinian intellectual tradition treats human agency as the only real agency with biological agency its unreal (as if) creation – the reading of human agency into non-human mindless organisms.

Scientifically the converse applies. Human agency has its origin in the biological agency that made human subjectivity possible. Human agency (for all its conscious, deliberative, and abstractive brilliance) is just one of many forms of biological agency and must be scientifically explained in terms of the evolutionary context out of which it arose.

Biological agency is not a fiction invented by the human consciously agential mind. The converse applies.  Human agency is just one highly evolved example of the many kinds of biological agency that made human subjectivity possible.

Third, the metaphor fallacy.

The treatment of minded humanizing language as cognitive metaphor.^[42] This fallacy interprets the relationship between biological agency and human agency using the logic of a literary device, the metaphor, in which one of the relata is always figurative (unreal). This forces the real evolutionary likeness between biological agency and human agency to be treated as an ‘as if’ (unreal) likeness, rather than a similarity resulting from real evolutionary connection. Were a literary device the appropriate mechanism for making this comparison then, in strict literary terms, the likeness is not metaphor but simile.

Fourth, the the agency error.

In science and philosophy, it is conventional for the anthropomorphic language of human intentional psychology (wants, needs, knows, deceives etc.), as applied to non-human organisms, to be treated as cognitive metaphor since it erroneously implies that mindless organisms possess cognitive faculties. By extension we then assume that non-human organisms therefore have no purpose and no agency.

There is a major flaw in this conventional account of cognitive metaphor. Subsuming all agency under human agency deprives mindless organisms of any form of agency. It refuses to acknowledge both the real and universal character of biological agency that unites the community of life, and its behavioral expression through evolutionarily graded forms.

Under closer inspection it is evident that, in general, such language is not referencing a figurative likeness based on human intentions (metaphor) but a real likeness (simile) that is grounded in universal biological agency, the goals of the biological axiom. For example, we say that a plant ‘wants’ water, not because we believe that plants have human-like desires, but because we acknowledge the universal disposition of all living organisms to survive, reproduce, and flourish.

We confuse the distinction that exists between the universal biological agency shared by all organisms and the minded form of this agency that is uniquely human. Much of the intentional language of human-talk applied to mindless organisms references universal biological, not uniquely human, agency.

This is the traditional and mistaken assumption that the agency we imply when using anthropomorphic language is the unique agency of humans when, in fact, its intended meaning relates to the universal biological agency that is present in all living organisms.

When we say that a plant ‘wants’ or ‘needs’ water we are not suggesting that plants experience intentional mental states, but that they share with us the universal biological agential disposition to survive, reproduce, and flourish. This is a form of biological empathy – but not a communion of minds, more a recognition of shared and mindless biological values.

Biological agency is not a metaphorical creation of human agency: human agency is a real evolutionary development of biological agency.

Fifth, biological empathy.

In spite of attempts to rid biology of purpose, agency, cognitive metaphor and other forms of the teleological idiom, we continue to use these forms of language because we fail to recognize that in doing so we are acknowledging the universal goals of biological agency, not the uniquely intentional goals of human agency.

For this reason – which amounts to a human empathy with biological agency – biology will never rid itself of teleology because this is a teleology that is grounded in the reality of evolutionary connection.

Sixth Precedence of behaviour over minds

Agency is expressed by the behavior of the bodies of autonomous agents. It is behavior as action (regardless of the internal process generating that behaviour) that most directly determines biological outcomes. Conscious intentions are uniquely human, but behaviour grounded in the biological axiom is expressed by all organisms and it takes explanatory precedence over internal causation.  Human behaviour, as influenced by conscious intentions, evolved out of mindless biological goals and is just one form of biological agency.

Seventh, Anthropocentric agential language

As uniquely minded organisms we humans we have devised the language of intentional psychology to describe our species-specific minded agency. Since there are no equivalent vocabularies for other species it is unsurprising that we use our own minded Homo sapiens terms to describe the agency of other organisms.

Anthropomorphic analogical language is, in general, not trying to convey the as if language of cognitive metaphor, but the real likeness of biological simile (the result of evolutionary connection).

From an evolutionary perspective human agency evolved out of (is a subset of) biological agency and thus the proximate minded and therefore (often) subjective goals of human agency, are subordinate to the ultimate objective goals of biological agency.

In sum, we have yet to scientifically accept that biological agency is not a metaphorical creation of human agency: human agency is a real evolutionary development of biological agency.

Historically, this philosophical confusion has been perpetuated by a pre-Darwinian anthropocentrism that understood life as Special Creation, rather than evolution with modification from a common ancestor.

If we regard anthropomorphism as cognitive metaphor or heuristic, then we not only devalue, but deny, the real evolutionarily graded agential reality of the organisms, structures, processes, and behaviours that unite the community of life.

If biological agency, goals, purposes, and values are real then their investigation can be transferred out of the realm of philosophical speculation and into the domain of scientific explanation.

Forms of biological agency

For humans, autonomy entails a conscious distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’. Our minds provide a sense of self as they segregate the world into objects of experience, focus on a limited range of these, group them according to similarities and differences, and prioritize them according to purpose, interest, or preparation for action. For simplicity we can refer to this complex agential process as mental adaptation, which is a form of human agency.

This minded human agency evolved out of the capacity of mindless organisms (as revealed by their behaviour) to discriminate between objects of their environment and to prioritize these in relation to themselves and their behaviour. That mindless adaptation is a demonstration of both autonomy and agency. And it is clearly out of this mindless process of adaptation that minded adaptation evolved.

Biological agency is manifest through agential behaviour as expressed by each biological body.  This behaviour is relatively uniform within a species due to their similarity of physical form. The agency of a plant is expressed in very different ways from from that of a fish.  However, since all organisms arose from a common ancestor the agential similarities between organisms is always a matter of degree.

When considering agency as it relates to minds, five kinds can be distinguished each building on the former:

mindless inorganic ‘agency’ – the ordering ‘behaviour’ of inanimate matter

mindless biological agency – agential (goal-directed) behaviour that is not mind-directed (also found in minded organisms e.g. unconscious sweating)

unconscious minded agency – the unconscious, intuitive or instinctive behaviour of minded creatures e.g. fear of snakes

conscious minded agency – as behaviour that is a consequence of conscious deliberation

collective or cultural agency – behaviour that is a product of collective learning usually communicated through symbolic language as socio-cultural norms

– – –

First published on the internet as independent page transposed from existing articles – 6 June 2023
. . . 7 June 2023 – the entry on biological explanation